Directory and Bios

Stark Center Director and IGH Co-editor

Contact Terry Todd

Terry Todd, Ph.D. began at the University of Texas on a full athletic scholarship in tennis. He lettered and played in the national intercollegiate championships, but also began lifting weights, and as an undergraduate won intercollegiate championships in weightlifting in the super-heavyweight class. He continued lifting during graduate school and over the next several years won national championships in both weightlifting and powerlifting, setting national and “world-best” records in the process. After a year and a half as managing editor of Strength & Health magazine, the leading journal in the field at that time, Terry began his teaching career as a faculty member at Auburn University. He later taught at Mercer University in Georgia and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, before returning to the University of Texas at Austin in 1983.

Terry has published five books __Inside Powerlifting (Contemporary Books, 1978); Fitness for Athletes (Contemporary Books, 1978); Herschel Walker’s Basic Training (Doubleday, 1985 & 1989); and with Jan Todd, Lift Your Way to Youthful Fitness: The Comprehensive Guide to Weight Training (Little, Brown and Company, 1985). He has also published more than 500 articles in both popular and academic publications, including Sports Illustrated, Readers’ Digest, the Journal of Sport History, Men’s Journal, Iron Man, Muscle & Fitness,Texas Monthly, and the National Strength and Conditioning Association Journal. He lectures often around the nation on the subjects of drugs in sports, conditioning, and sport/fitness history. For the past seven years, Todd has directed the Arnold Strongman Classic a strength contest designed to pit weightlifters, powerlifters, and professional strongman competitors against each other in events that test basic strength.

Terry served as CBS’ commentator on sports medicine and drugs in the year prior to, and during, both the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympic Games. He has also worked as a color commentator on sports for CBS, NBC, ESPN, and the BBC and has appeared many times on such shows as the “McNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” the “Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” “ABC Nightly News,” “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “CNN News,” and CNN’s “Newsmakers.” He has consulted for many television programs, including “60 Minutes.” He also provided commentaries on sports medicine and history for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition for many years.

In 1979 Terry was inducted into the United States Powerlifting Federation’s (USPF) Hall of Fame. In 1992 he was honored by the Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen. Todd was selected as an inaugural member into the USA Powerlifting Association’s Women’s Hall of Fame in 2004. In 2005 he was inducted into the Strength Coaching Hall of Fame. In 2008 Todd received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oscar Heidenstam Foundation.

Stark Center Co-Director and IGH Co-editor

Contact Jan Todd

Jan Todd , Ph.D., the Roy J. McLean Fellow in Sport History__is both a sport historian and a well-known expert on strength training. A Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at The University of Texas at Austin, Jan teaches courses in sport and exercise history, sport philosophy, and sport ethics and also serves as the department’s Undergraduate Advisor. For many years she also supervised the weight training and conditioning classes taught by the department. She has written two books: Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women (Mercer University Press, 1998) and, with her husband, Terry Todd, Lift Your Way to Youthful Fitness (Little-Brown, 1985), the first popular book to argue that weight training could be used to offset the aging process.

Jan was also a contributor to the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s (NSCA) “Position Paper on Strength Training for Female Athletes” (1989) and received the NSCA’s Presidents Award in 1990 for her work on that publication. In addition, Todd has written more than one hundred articles in popular and scholarly journals on various aspects of strength training and exercise. She also lectures frequently. In 2008 Todd delivered the Seward Staley Address at the North American Society for Sport History; in 2000 she was the keynote speaker at the New England ACSM symposium on strength training; in 1999 she delivered the keynote address at the ACSM’s Fitness Summit in New Orleans; and in 1998 she was the D. B. Dill Historical Lecturer for the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) at their annual meeting in Orlando.

Todd’s interest in the academic study of strength and exercise grew from her personal involvement in the sport of powerlifting. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Todd was considered by both Sports Illustrated and the Guinness Book of Records to be the “strongest woman in the world.” In 1982 she became the first woman inducted into the International Powerlifting Hall of Fame. In 1992 Todd received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen. Todd set world records in five bodyweight classes during her 12-year powerlifting career; her personal bests were 545 pounds in the squat and 1230 pounds in the partial deadlift. Todd was inducted into USA Powerlifting’s Women’s Hall of Fame in 2004, the Texas Powerlifting Hall of fame in 2005, and in 2008 she was honored by the Oscar Heidenstam Foundation in England for her contributions to the field of physical culture. Todd was also recently (2009) inducted into the National Fitness Hall of Fame. Read more about Todd’s career in this Health Magazine article (requires PDF reader) from 1999.

Faculty

IGH Associate Editor and Business/Subscriptions Manager

Contact Kim Beckwith

Kim Beckwith, Ph.D. is a lecturer and the Coordinator of Strength and Conditioning in the Kinesiology Department. Kim met Jan and Terry Todd when she enrolled in a weight training class at UT as an undergraduate. With their encouragement, she joined the Longhorn Powerlifting Team and became one of the premier drug-free, collegiate lifters in the country. She set many American and national collegiate records in two different weight classes, won three national titles, and earned recognition as the strongest collegiate female, pound-for-pound, in the American Drug Free Powerlifting Association for three straight years.

Kim became interested in studying the history of physical culture and exercise while taking classes to earn her master’s degree in Sports Administration. She began volunteering her time to Iron Game History as the business/subscriptions manager and offered to help in cataloguing the Collection. Exposure and access to so much unique physical culture history piqued her interest and eventually caused her to obtain her doctoral degree in sport history. Her dissertation examined the life and impact of one of the pioneers of American weight training: “Building Strength: Alan Calvert, the Milo Bar-bell Company, and the Modernization of American Weight Training.”

Before returning to graduate school, Kim was a faculty member at Austin Community College, teaching there from 1991 to 2000. Since 1995 she has served as the coach of the Longhorn Powerlifting Team and has directed the USAPL Longhorn Open Powerlifting Championships each fall. She is also currently serving as the USAPL Texas State Chair.

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health

Contact John D. Fair

John D. Fair, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, he was educated at Juniata College (B.A., 1965), Wake Forest University (M.A., 1966) and Duke University (Ph.D., 1970). He has also held teaching appointments in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maine, Alabama, and Georgia. His areas of specialization include British and Irish History, Southern History, and the History of Physical Culture and Sports. Dr. Fair is a retiree from Auburn University at Montgomery (1997) and Georgia College & State University (2012).

As an undergraduate John played intercollegiate tennis for four years and started serious weight training. Since his first meet in 1964, he has competed in 75 sanctioned weightlifting and powerlifting meets. He was also a member of the United States National Weightlifting Committee (1972-76), served as Southeast US Powerlifting Chairman (1973-76), was a judge at the 1973 Mr. America Contest, served as a volunteer in the weightlifting venue at the 1996 Olympics, and has been an official for the strongman competition at the annual Arnold Sports Festival in Ohio since 2002.

John’s academic background includes authorship of seven books, including MuscletownUSA, Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell, 1898-1985 (Penn State, 1999) and Mr. America, The Tragic History of a Bodybuilding Icon (Texas, 2015). He has also published 46 refereed articles, 48 miscellaneous articles, and 109 book reviews in scholarly journals. John authored all the physical culture articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

His scholarship has been recognized by various honors, including Alumni Professor of History, 1995-98 (AUM); Fellow, Royal Historical Society (London), 1996-Present; Professor Emeritus of History (Auburn University), 1997-Present; and the Excellence in Research and Publication Award, 2004-5, 2006-7, and 2010-11 (Georgia College).

You can read more about John’s involvement in physical culture from Gina Kolata’s book, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise (2003).

Assistant Director for Academic Affairs

Contact Thomas M. Hunt

Thomas M. Hunt, J.D., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also holds an appointment as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports. As a faculty member in the Sport Management and Physical Culture and Sports programs at UT, he teaches classes in sport history, sport law, sport and ethics, and sport, fitness and mass media. With research interests that include sport law, history, and international relations, Dr. Hunt has published articles in, among others, the Journal of Sport History, the International Journal of the History of Sport, and Olympika: The Journal of Olympic Studies. His book, Drug Games: The International Olympic Committee and the Politics of Doping, 1960-2008, is now available from the University of Texas Press.

Staff

Library Assistant

Contact Kyle Martin

Kyle Martin is a born-and-raised Austin native. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Writing & Rhetoric: Creative Focus from St. Edward’s University, where he graduated cum laude in May 2010. He has since published short fiction with Foxing Quarterly, Fields Magazine, Ambit Magazine, and won third prize in the Austin Chronicle’s 19th Annual Short Story Contest. He can regularly be found running the hike and bike trail at Town Lake.

Archivist

Contact Geoff Schmalz

Geoff Schmalz graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a Bachelor’s of Arts in History in 1998. He then worked in a variety of capacities for Barnes and Noble Booksellers in both Minnesota and Texas from 2000 to 2007. He entered the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 2006, graduating with a Masters of Science in Information Studies in May of 2008. He focused his studies on Archival Enterprise.

Geoff joined the Stark Center staff in August of 2009. Geoff has now completed ten finding aids for the Stark Center. He is currently working on the Bob Goldman Papers. Bob Goldman is a pioneer in the area of sports medicine. His books, Death in the Locker Room: Steroids and Sports (1984) (with the aid of Patricia Bush and Ronald Klatz), and Death in the Locker Room II: Drugs and Sports (1992) (with the aid of Klatz), exposed the dangerous body and mind altering drugs athletes were taking (and still take) to gain a competitive edge. Geoff is excited to delve into the Bob Goldman materials, to process them and to make them available through a computer finding aid. The finding aid is an archival outline of the collection which will aid future researchers in the topics of doping and sports medicine. Geoff is delighted to aid the Stark Center in its mission of educating the public about the history of sports, weight training, bodybuilding, and fitness. Geoff loves sports, especially UT Austin sports, and claims to be thrilled to have an office in DKR Texas Memorial Stadium.

Associate Director for Library Services

Contact Cindy Slater

Cindy Slater comes to The Stark Center from the U.S. Olympic Committee, where she was the Manager of Library & Archives for over 20 years.

As one of the few “sports librarians” in the country, Cindy has extensive experience with the sport science and medicine literature, as well as Olympic-related documentation and organizations. She will be working to catalog the 30,000+ volumes in The Center’s library collection. She is looking forward to assisting researchers and UT students with their physical culture-related research.

Digital Archivist

Contact Brent Sipes

Equipped with a MSIS from the UT School of Information, Brent Sipes applies his passion for library technology, digital librarianship, and archival practice to the Stark Center’s often fascinating world of physical culture and sport. His professional interests are the social and political makeup of information architectures, and how the design of and access to these architectures help shape particular networks and communities. In his free time he’s reading something good, watching something bad, or on his bike enjoying the city.